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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L2 - 21 May - Blood And Skulls

« on: July 24, 2020, 10:35:31 pm »

When you see your feedback isn't going anywhere, or keeps going in circles, just give up.
People who agree with it, have seen it (and mostly don't react to it).
People who don't agree with it, will just keep not agreeing with it... changing opinions on this forum is a very rare sight (maybe not only on this forum? ).

Dioxine has most likely seen it, or will see it in the near future... and will decide on his own.

I agree with you on many (not all) specific points.
There's a LOT of things I don't like in piratez... but there's even more I do like.
The mod is for free and it is just a single-player game... don't be afraid to cheat and don't be afraid to mod it.
I've played this mod only twice (many real-world months each)... and I cheated and modded both times.
I don't feel bad about it, quite the contrary.... it made my experience a lot more pleasurable.
And that's the only thing that counts.

Thanks.

The thing is, the most interesting (although longest) project would be a new (and very deadly) AI, and I'm not sure this community would appreciate that. For starters, even if ranged enemies couldn't hit you if you were standing next to them, I would definitely program them to take a step aside before shooting your gal. So it would make melee much harder, and it seems that is the preferred way to play.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L2 - 21 May - Blood And Skulls

« on: July 23, 2020, 12:42:10 am »

Ok. I have been thinking about this for a bit, and the reactions I got. Let's do this in a Q&A format.

Q: Do you feel entitled to tell Dioxine and company how they should develop their mod?
A: No. Why would I? It's what they want to do.

Q: So, why are you bitching about it?
A: I'm not. I'm a project manager / software developer myself, and I love feedback. Especially from people who used my product a lot and tell me why they did and didn't like things. So I give feedback myself.

Q: But, it's a superb mod! Why would anyone want to change something about it?
A: So, how many people play it, for how long, and if they stop playing it, why? Did you finish it, or are you just occasionally starting it to get your fix? How many times did you upgrade it during your current playthrough?

Q: It doesn't matter how many others play it how often! The Team and us love it to bits! It's perfect!
A: So, there is nothing more to add or change to make it even better?

Q: The base game is far too short! And all games are more or less the same. I want a much longer game and I want more of everything!
A: Welcome to X-Piratez. You'll love it.

Q: I really want to like X-Piratez, but I don't know how to start. It's overwhelming. I don't know what to do.
A: Just keep trying. After a while you'll get it. But it's quite different from the base game (a quickstart guide that highlights those differences might help). It is really long, and it will take you hundreds of hours before you even know what the important bits are.

Q: I love X-Piratez, I start it up multiple times each month to play a few battles, but then I forgot what I was trying to do. Can I safely upgrade to the last version? And what should I research? How long is it going to take to finish?
A: There is a thread on upgrading, all the other things you have to figure out for yourself. If you don't play it frequently, I strongly suggest you keep notes.

Q: I have been playing it multiple times each week for years. It is too short. I love the tactical battles in this game. They're perfect. Although a bit unpredictable and with lots of repetition.
A: You would probably like a "custom battle" option, where you can specify what enemies there are and the level of the equipment available.

Q: I have been playing this for quite a while, but it is too long and there is so little improvement. You have to collect and research a hundred things between upgrades. And there's, like, a hundred weapons that do like 30-40 damage. Which one should I choose?
A: I might make a mod for that. But don't hold your breath.

Q: Well, I like it. Although I prefer actually playing it, ie: doing battles, to all the boring housekeeping you do in the base. And I love upgrading my equipment!
A: So, you might like UI improvements, like the scroll bar staying put, that pressing X in any sell/buy/transfer screen should select/deselect all, not having to sell vehicles by hand when you press the "Sell" button at manufacturing and specifying how new prisoners should be processed. And an "undo last action, I misclicked" key during battles.

Q: Well, I like it. Although I prefer actually playing it, ie: building the bases, making money, researching, shooting down enemies and managing my teams. I use debug mode for boring battles.
A: So, you might like UI improvements, like seeing when the VooDoo training will be finished, automatically turning on martial training if available, a button that shows you the bootypedia entry instead of the research tree one, a hyperlink that does the same for components in the manufacturing menu, the amount of items you already have when producing things. And an "auto-battle" option, with high-speed movement.

Q: Although I love the battles, they're not very hard. Yes, the enemy has superior equipment, but they're pretty dumb. Except for their numbers and the really dangerous ones, like Exalts and Mercenaries, or the ones with mini-nukes, of course. But they all just hang around and take potshots if they spot an enemy. They don't actually do all that much.
A: Yes. A smart, non-cheating AI would be great. Because, the hard difficulty isn't all that hard. It mostly increases the amount of enemies. Which results in more improvements for your soldiers, more loot and more things to research. It makes it easier in the long run. It would be much better if you could tune the AI to make it easier or harder. In easy mode, they all go outside, walk around and the civilians want to surrender. On hard, they form groups, stay out of sight, hunt you down and destroy you.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L2 - 21 May - Blood And Skulls

« on: July 21, 2020, 08:19:34 pm »

I am sorry you feel entitled to universal agreement. Is this better?

No, that's totally not it. I start playing, I enjoy it, then there is little to no progress. I make a mod to speed it up, which kinda works, restart and enjoy it for the first in-game year. I am tinkering a bit with the mod, decide I'm stupid to change the game files itself (because it started very small) instead of making it a proper mod from the start. Now I have to use a comparison tool to do that. Oh, well, it's not that much work. I wonder about how the maps are build and decide the AI could use a serious check-up. I download the OCXE source and start thinking about what to do and how to do it. While still playing the game. Heck, I even watch the occasional Meridian and QuickMind playthrough.

But after a while, there is too little progress in the game and the new and sexy is at best a tiny upgrade of the current and I start changing more and more, to keep it interesting. And after a while I'm spending more time on researching and modding, so when there's a new roadblock, I lose interest.

That's it. And such a cycle takes a few months. And I did play this for 5 months. I am out of a job and so have plenty of time. I guess in total I spend more than 600 hours on it over the last 9 months.


Edit: as I said in the first post, I should either quit or make a full-fledged mod to change it all to my liking. To better integrate the progress and roadblocks into a sped-up game. I might still do that, but probably not right now.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L2 - 21 May - Blood And Skulls

« on: July 21, 2020, 06:36:38 pm »

Well, yes, ok, you have to spend at least a whole year in real time to have a good chance of winning. I get that. My try to speed that up to a month or three failed, because the RNG is tweaked to give you the minimum when you play for that whole year.

Yes, I also checked how the missions and events worked. For example, after 6 months in game after the prereqs were met, the VooDoo initiation event still hadn't triggered. Ok, it had 50% chance of firing, it just didn't. That's random chance for you. I added it to the list myself and it fired. And then I lost interest. I didn't want to have to make so many changes to keep progressing. And I'm not planning to spend 7 more months IRL to finally see most of it and finish it.

Ok, I gave it plenty of chances and spend lots of time on it, but it's not my game. And seen from the comments here, it's only for the really hard-core fans. I guess I'm not one of them.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L2 - 21 May - Blood And Skulls

« on: July 21, 2020, 09:40:38 am »

The solution to your problem with tech blocks is to attend more of every kind of mission you can get access to. Zombies are for example present on almost every mission/craft but only at a 5% chance. You need to attend alot of encounters to see all the zombie types with even a half way decent chance.

But I did every single mission. Sometimes aborting, sometimes Ctrl-D, Ctrl-J, but I went to each one of them. Well except a few underground and underwater ones before I was ready for those.

Progression and the whole is tailored to an very aggressive exploitation of every avenue your offered, sitting back and expecting the game to just hand you the means to progress and victory is not how it works. If you don't like that style of game you have already suggested the answers yourself.

So, play for half a year in real-time, and if you get stuck for a long time, abort and restart? Yes, that's nice if you only want to play this single game for the rest of your life. By now, I started this five times and I played it for about five months in total. And I get stuck the whole time for very long stretches. Except for the obvious ones, the enemies encountered and the stuff I find is highly random. Many of which you'll never see in a single playthrough. And then you get stuck.

It's a great game, but it needs an editor and test team. Just adding more stuff all the time and blocking large parts through RNG doesn't work if it has to be playable for others than the super-dedicated. And get rid of most of the stuff that is functional the same.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L2 - 21 May - Blood And Skulls

« on: July 20, 2020, 11:16:15 pm »

So, what do you do when you miss things to continue after a few years, like fat zombies and ghoul scientists? I did get one zombie mission, but it was regular zombies and stingers. And while I researched organ harvesting, no ghoul missions yet. Only a regular one from a pogrom.

I started again, but modded to my liking. The main thing: brainers are just a quarter as expensive and research buildings hold twice the amount. Some minor other tweaks, mostly to increase the capacity of buildings slightly. I added some stuff to the starter base: a few early-mid game armors and guns, and some research block removers (like a stapler and two cockroaches, as those held me up a long time the previous run). I changed the light sniper rifle slightly and made it available after Jack's town. And a few rubies  to get me started. I'm playing on the medium difficulty.

But, after a year, there was nothing left to research and my equipment was still seriously lacking. So I added some more blocking items, to both the save and the starting equipment. That didn't help long. And I was waiting for the ghoul scientist and fat zombies all the time. The previous playthrough, I got loads of those missions, so I expected them "any month now", but they never turned up.

What to do? Add them all? But what would then be the point of playing the game? Restart the game, again, after playing it for two months? Is that the expected behavior? I REALLY don't like that.

The only solutions seem to be: 1. Stop playing the game. 2. Make an extensive mod that also removes those RNG roadblocks, or at least add another option to get them. Which is a lot of work, especially in testing it all out.


Oh, I forgot: I really like the new terrain and the other additions. But the amount of "mostly equal things" is still very large.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - K2 - 2 Nov - Ice Ice Cool

« on: February 15, 2020, 01:21:09 am »

I lost interest, so it took a while:

This is the very essence of "UFO: Enemy Unknown/X-COM: UFO Defense" the original game!  Did you try vanilla openxcom?  Did you like it?  If you are not proficient with vanilla, you'll most likely have a hard time with X-Piratez.

I played Vanilla and OpenXCom many times. I love them, because they're a unique genre all by themselves (UFO and TFTD). Yes, the aliens are very accurate and hit hard, so I expect to lose multiple soldiers every mission. It's part of the game, and they're easily replaceable. The main difference between a rookie and an officer is the morale gained, or lost when killed. And I always sack every soldier with less than 40-50 morale.

There is easy replacement of gals, all it takes is cash.  Perhaps you have neglected some early research topics.

In Piratez, the replacement soldiers are hard to get or useless wimps. Yes, even the extremely expensive veterans and freaks. The freaks get *ONE* stat that is on par with a Lunatic, and all the other ones will never get good.

There are plenty of lethal weapons some of which are available from the very beginning.  Don't expect all your gals to be toting heavy plasma 3 months in like vanilla.  Just because you can't research a weapon yet, doesn't automatically mean you can't use it.  Advanced armors probably takes the longest to get your gals equipped, just like the OG.  But the early armors are useful.

Don't be afraid to skip or abort missions where the odds are heavily stacked against you.  Try to do the high scoring ones; it will take some experience to figure out which score well.

Well, in the third month or so, the enemy simply nuked all but two of my gals. BOOM! Now, three years in, I still haven't got anything even half as lethal.

And while chain mail is cool for the first two years, it doesn't make much difference afterwards. Your gals still melt after a single attack, if it is more dangerous than civilians.

And, yes, I aborted more than half the missions because they were hopeless. Not in the least because I couldn't afford to lose the gals and hardware.

In Piratez, losing gals and equipment is punished harshly and improvement is extremely glacial. Which is the opposite of what made the originals the classics they are.

In the originals I research laser weapons and I can take on the aliens on equal terms. In Piratez, I research thousands of things that sound cool but require tens of requisites and are obsolete the moment they are available. My gals get comparatively weaker all the time.

It's probably fun if you spend a few years learning the optimal research route and just like to play the same few battles again, again, again and again, while you get weaker if the RNG doesn't give you one of the requisites. But who cares, if you lose, you start a new game that is going to take half a year to finish.

I like replayability and diversity, but I'm no masochist.

Then again, the Quickmind let's play shows that melee is very powerful. Throw your weapons and armor away, they will only hamper you! It's like a Japanese game, where a Katana beats a nuke, and a single, unarmed combatant slaughters battalions of soldiers armed with firearms.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - K2 - 2 Nov - Ice Ice Cool

« on: February 01, 2020, 10:53:33 pm »

The X-prison escape is really hard: starting at the third turn half your gals panic each turn because the morale of all of them dropped below 50%. Next time I only take gals with 80+ bravery, to see if that helps a bit.

And I really dislike it that on average, the enemy only has to hit one of your gals once or twice with their superior weapons to kill them, while your gals have to hit those enemies more than five times with the best weapon they can use. Half the weapons I loot are superior to what my gals are armed with, so I have to sell them because I'm not allowed to use them and cannot research them. That sucks quite a bit.

Either allow easy replacement of gals, which goes against the very slow improvement curve, or allow them to use lethal weapons. And the same goes for armor.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - K2 - 2 Nov - Ice Ice Cool

« on: January 30, 2020, 09:11:37 pm »

AI: Most AIs treat all NPCs as puppets. NPCs should take individual decisions and communicate. Some could carry radios, others would have to shout. If they're cowardly, they try to stick together. And they hide behind terrain, peek around to scan or shoot. The commander should set the battle plan according to his stats. But all of it just simple, individual actions. That would make it very dynamic and quite a bit harder. 

Graphics: As it is, it's low-res 2D. And on the battlefield it is painted cell by cell: first the background, then the floor, the the items and lastly the object on top. The simplest way to make it more dynamic is to use OpenGL, and to paint each object, sprite or alphanumeric as a texture on a billboard (a rectangle facing the viewer). Just put them all next to and very close behind one another. That way it becomes resolution independent: the window/screen size as well as the resolution of the graphics. They all get automatically scaled. And a fixed viewing angle and no perspective prevents most artifacts. Although it might look weird if you put high-res next to low-res.

The whole battle field can be set up in one go, the shader(s) can figure out which sprite frame to use by themselves. And FreeType can render Unicode glyphs (chars) to bitmaps, for nice text dialogs in any language.

Dynamic maps: I don't know how it works at the moment, but in 3D modelling you have objects (often consisting of rectangles) and materials (a list of surfaces/textures you put on top). And that is basically how a battlefield looks like. Chop the whole viewing space into big voxels (boxes). Give each of them their own billboard. Take or generate a height map and background material (like, grass). And then you put objects, like ships or buildings on top of that, wherever there is space. That would also make it easy to build a graphical terrain/object editor. And simplify rendering, as you just have a single billboard with a material for each cell, instead of lots of both.


All of that is not very hard to do, but still, quite a lot of work.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - K2 - 2 Nov - Ice Ice Cool

« on: January 29, 2020, 11:57:42 pm »

Btw:

One thing you need to understand is that, even though Piratez is such an expansive spaghetti monster of a mod, its still just a mod running on an extended version of the original openxcom, and so it cannot stray too far from the core UFO:EU gameplay. You can certainly bend it in some ways and create interesting things, like turrets, units that occupy 4 tiles and units that spawn other units, but only because there was a possibility for those things in the original game engine, IE you're still bound to the original framework provided by openxcom.

I'm a programmer. Half the idea was to see if it would be fun to add to OXCE. Like, a really good AI that doesn't cheat. A better UI. 3D scaling and mixing resolutions. Or random terrain. Or lots of other things. But all of those would go against rule #1: it has to play the base game unchanged. So I'm not sure there would be much enthusiasm for all that.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - K2 - 2 Nov - Ice Ice Cool

« on: January 29, 2020, 11:17:49 pm »

I installed K2 just when it was released, with the intention to give it at least a few days. I start a new game, at the middle difficulty. And, almost immediately I got my first mission: "Save a sister". The airbus had landed a few tiles behind the fence at the back of the main building, and there were four enemies in sight. I couldn't exit the craft or take potshots at the enemy, without getting shredded by reaction fire. And while I couldn't hit them, they could hit my gals easily through the windows. Still, I managed to take those initial enemies down, but my last, very wounded gal succumbed to the Highwayman from the cellar.

Whelp! That didn't go very well!. It sure is X-COM, though. Part of the game. I'll just hire some new gals and buy a new ship, and I'm ready to go. Oh, wait, I can't...

It took me almost two months of researching the wrong things before I could hire peasants and buy a usable ship, by selling everything else. And those peasants had stats that were less than a sixth of the Lunatics. They couldn't hit the side of a barn, or walk 10 steps. Needless to say, that after about half a year, I was so far behind on the tech curve that I was happy if I had to abort less than half the missions. And no money whatsoever.

After almost a year, the situation was clearly unsalvageable, so I started a new game on easy, which I'm still playing. And I gave myself 25 Mil so I could buy a few brainers and a second base, just in case. It's still hard, but manageable. Gals are still hard to replace, so it's not really like X-COM. Although half the enemies are quite lethal, so that is rather like X-COM.

But it takes a long time playing the same missions over and over again, researching an endless amount of things that are mostly useless, or 1% better than my current equipment, in between the very few events and items that do make things better. Mostly Chainmail and salvaged Reticulan Plasma guns, and Church lasers. Which you can use once before you run out of ammo. So I gave myself a few hundred clips, to keep interest going.

This week, I started modding a few things, because even with about a hundred hours played and more than 25% researched, the main things that keep my gals alive are lots of experience and the stuff mentioned above. And I started to use debug mode to skip the easy and boring missions, like a ship with only a few civilians, or a Temple of Sirius, after taking out the priests.

Although I do have some nice ships. Two Predators, with a Nightmare being build. It's fun coordinating attacks on large ships.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - K2 - 2 Nov - Ice Ice Cool

« on: January 28, 2020, 03:04:21 am »

X-Piratez...

The games I have played most often are Deus-Ex, Morrowind and Fallout:Tactics. The best game not on that list is Planescape: Torment.

UFO is strangely missing from that list, because it took decades before I could get it to run. I got the floppy version right at the start, but no massaging of the DOS system files made it work. And by the time I did get it to work, I was spoiled by Fallout: Tactics. Meh. Right?

So, second to F:T. Or, actually, not. Because it's Brutal. It requires a totally different way of playing. Those aliens are going to kill all of us! We have to stop them! A million dead soldiers would be a cheap price for the survival of humanity! And those aliens are really dangerous. They melt your soldiers from the far side of the map. You cannot even see them, let alone hit them. And if you do, it causes puny damage.

Wow. There is no other game like it. And all the sequels (except TFTD, but that's too hardcore) did this wrong.

Ok, X-Piratez. The first few times I played it, I was quite irritated by the prehistoric starting conditions and the demand for melee combat. Bah. It seemed a quite stupid and immature mod. In less than an hour, I uninstalled it. Low-res tits, but no gameplay.

But still, many people (like on rpgcodex.net) think this is the best mod ever. And the last time I tried, I was determined to play it for at least a few days. Which totally changed my view. It took a long time, but it turned out to be a Magnus Opus. Pixelated: yes, bad animations: yes, very restricted strategic user interface (either research or manufacture): yes. But it keeps going. There is so much stuff, so many things to do. And you always think: "That would improve my options/fire power quite a bit! Just a few more turns."

It's really, Really good.

Then again, it's also boring. I cannot stomach it for more than about four hours in a row. While I love the strategic part, the tactical part is just too repetitive. Yes, it improves after you played that same mission 25 times. Because you sometimes get a new mission. And everything is extremely balanced. In a single-player game. After playing it for a few hundred hours, I can state that the two things that kept it interesting, were the Reticulan plasma gun and the Chainmail armor. I cheated as well: I gave myself 25 million at the start, and as much Reticulan plasma clips as needed.

The interesting things about single-player games are the story (the first time) and what tactics and items give you an advantage. Min-maxing. Finding faster routes to get that game changing item or ability sooner. And, yes, you can do that in X-Piratez, but it requires a huge amount of meta. Spend as much time researching the game online as playing it. It takes a very large amount of time, and the advantage isn't that large. Unless you play at the higher difficulty levels, where doing that for all things is required. Otherwise, you simply lose. Back to researching the meta. Not playing the game, but finding out how the game works and what it wants you to do.

While I do love a seriously challenging fight occasionally, which takes hours and has me at the edge of my seat, I would want an "auto battle" button for all the trash fights in between. Or, if all fights are like that, I would lose interest soon, because I like advancing through the strategic layer. Getting better. Building bases, researching and producing better stuff. Give me my overpowered stuff. Let me fight or work hard for it, but don't make it disposable or require unobtainable ammo. It's fine if it has disadvantages as well, as long as those don't limit the usability too much.

TL;DR: It's really great, but much too balanced and repetitive. After a while it takes a long time of doing the same things again and again before you get the next toy.

Make it batshit crazy and really excessive.


Recommendations:

- Huge suicide charges / nukes with a range that is too short to survive firing them.
- Armors that give lots of speed and/or stealth but have no hand slots.
- Reactive/mirroring armor that does lots of stun damage to the user.
- Very expensive one-time use tools that destroy ship hulls.
- Low-level things like musical instruments that do massive morale damage to enemies.
- "Teleporters" that give you a random chance each turn to exchange places with any enemy.
- Small, autonomous drones that roam around and/or attack independently, bonus if there is a small chance for them to attack you.
- Base building that attracts enemies to invade.
- Illnesses that infect both your gals and enemies, unless vaccinated, with a small chance to mutate.
- Parachute-dropped armaments (like cluster bombs): destroy them before they rain down death and destruction.
- Hormones that have the local wildlife fight each other.
- Missions that pacify regions.
- Spy missions.
- Diplomacy: give them money and gifts, but allies might request attacks.